Online ‘jam’ spreads information mix

Last year Luke Sayers, the chief executive of
PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia
, held an online “jam" with 5000 staff and 400 partners asking them what the firm’s values and strategy should be. Within 48 hours of the brainstorming session, the firm had outlined its new core values.

“This is just one example of how online collaboration tools are changing the way organisations communicate internally," says PwC partner and national digital change leader,
John Riccio
. “Unlike online employee surveys, where questions are set, the online jam allowed people to take the discussion where they wanted to. Without it, there was no way the firm could have devised core values so quickly," he says.

An employer’s internal communications were once closely controlled, but organisations are increasingly willing to hand the conch to their staff in the name of employee engagement and better collaboration.

Riccio estimates about 25 per cent of corporate Australia is using online collaborative tools such as Jive, Chatter, Microsoft’s Yammer, or IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Telstra, Suncorp, Vodafone, Westfield and Woolworths have all adopted these tools and more than one-third of public servants have access to some or all social media at work.

PwC uses Jive, called “Spark" internally, to connect nearly 169,000 people in 158 countries. They are able to join groups with specific interests, share information and locate people with particular skills. Spark allows people to post “like" comments or label them as inappropriate, and to start a conversation thread.“We are getting increasing results – 57 per cent of our people are using it daily or weekly, " Riccio says.

In the past two years, PwC’s internal email volumes have dropped by a whopping 25 per cent. And Riccio says Spark has halved the time it takes PwC to compile some proposals.

He believes ultimately online collaborative tools can save businesses up to 30 per cent in costs. Critics say these online tools are usually only taken up by early adopters who willingly collaborate by other methods anyway. But both Riccio and Telstra general manager of internal communications
Matthew Trewin
say a key to widespread use is involvement from top executives.

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Telstra began using Yammer in 2008, but for several years it was used by just a small number of tech-savvy staff. Trewin says the turning point came last year when Telstra officially sanctioned Yammer as a collaboration tool and leaders including chief executive
David Thodey
began using it regularly. Telstra is now the eighth-largest Yammer user globally.

Some employers are wary because of confidentiality and reputation concerns. Last month, for example, a prison officer in South Australia lost his unfair dismissal case after using a colleague’s email account to send out a prank message to his department announcing the colleague was gay.

People can be “really frank and upfront", Trewin says, but if problems arise, usual staff codes of conduct and social media policies would apply. Riccio says people are conscious of the environment and people who are listening. “They will modify themselves or someone else will say something."

It seems many employers are willing to take on these additional risks in order to boost productivity.
John Rizzo
, senior vice-president at
Jive Software
, visited Australia this month and said demand for Jive was growing rapidly, with his company is growing at 40-50 per cent a year, most strongly now outside of the company’s base in the US. He says a top three business consultancy firm in the US surveyed Jive customers and found they had seen a 15 per cent increase in worker productivity, a 24 per cent reduction in employee turnover and a 34 per cent reduction in time looking for information and expertise across the company.